Thoughts, Findings, and Rants…

How to Print a LinkedIn Profile as a Resume

Update: March 11, 2015
Finally updated this code to match LinkedIn’s current layout. Will try to be a little more proactive, but thanks to those that “inspired” me to get on it already! :-) Both the link below and Github have been updated.Update: March 31, 2015
I just went to my Profile to make sure everything was working correctly and it loaded like garbage! At first I thought LinkedIn had changed their layout again, but it was because I was viewing my Profile as a different “user type”… So I have added a brief set of instructions below the Bookmarklet.Update: April 30, 2015
This Update chain is getting pretty ridiculous, but this Update introduces my first Chrome Extension that does the same thing as this Bookmarklet!Update: November 5, 2015
I’ve updated the code for the Bookmarklet and the Chrome Extension, both on GitHub and the Chrome Web Store, though that update is lagging a bit (should be version 2.0).

Do you have a LinkedIn Profile? Have you ever tried to print it as a resume? Well, here is my saga (and if you don’t want the whole song-and-dance, you can skip to the result)…

Naturally, LinkedIn wants you to do your business directly within their website, which makes sense to them. But sadly, it isn’t always realistic; many jobs want you to upload your resume as a PDF.

LinkedIn does offer a feature that you may be familiar with, Export to PDF, which does in fact export your profile as a PDF. But it doesn’t have the best appearance (especially the Skills & Expertise section!), and several sections are completely missing (Volunteer Experience & Causes, Publications, Honors & Awards)!

Update: These sections were initially missing from my export, but now do appear in my export. That may have been because those were new sections that I added earlier that day, perhaps there is a process that happens, maybe nightly, that updates my profile and what gets sent to the Export feature.

LinkedIn also offers a feature you may not be familiar with, via their Labs, called ResumeBuilder. This feature lets you customize the appearance of your resume, choose sections to include or not, and then print that as a PDF. However… While this feature does handle the Skills & Expertise section better, what it does with the bullets in my Experience section is less than ideal… And there are still sections missing (Volunteer Experience & Causes, Projects, Honors & Awards, Recommendations). Arguably, some of these sections shouldn’t be included, but I’d like the option of choice…

So, typically in my fashion, when I couldn’t find something that did what I wanted, I decided to make something that did. So, here is my LinkedIn Resume Bookmarklet:LinkedIn Resume

Just drag this Bookmarklet into your browser bookmarks, then next time you’re viewing your LinkedIn Profile page, give it a click. Your Profile should immediately be transformed into something that looks pretty good on the screen and prints well.

Note: I had trouble in some browsers with character-encoding that broke the JS, so you might have to copy/paste the JS into the Bookmarklet…

Thanks, Roy, yes, the drag-and-drop seems to be buggy with some browsers, not sure why, but glad you got it to work!

As for the page breaks, yes, they’re a bit tricky, as different sections will break differently for different people, and the CSS doesn’t seem to be able to figure out exactly where to break very well…

For my own, I ended up playing with it just a bit via the Inspector panel in Chrome, so it worked out pretty nicely…

A cheat, to be sure, but I got (nearly) what I wanted, so I call that a *win*! :-)

I would love to get it work. I’ve tried to copy/paste the code in the end of your file available on github without success. In firefox (i’m on a mac) When on profile, i get a blank page with [object HTMLStyleElement] written as first line. With safari, the bookmarklet simply doesn’t work.

If you are able to help me, it would be great!
Best regards and congrats for the website.

Ok, I’ve found the issue for FF, and the updated code is posted to GitHub.

I can’t figure out how to change Bookmark URLs in Safari/Win, and I can’t get the drag-and-drop working properly, some conflict between a crap-load of JS inside an <a> tag’s HREF, pushing all that through WP, then trying to drag-and-drop into a Bookmark, causes a conflict, go figure… :-)

First of all thanks for this! But I have an issue, for some reason the contact info section and the profile picture are not showing completely. They´re just cut. I´m guessing it could be easily adjusted by tweaking the margins in the code but I have absolutely no coding knowledge and my attempts at modifying the code so far resulted in failure. Any help or directions would be really appreciated!

Hey Aaron, thanks for your quick reply! sorry for getting back at you just now.
I tried on both firefox and chrome both up to date versions.
Here´s a snip of what it looks like:http://www.sendspace.com/file/2lsaws
I´m guessing it has to do with some values of the box containing the picture, I tried looking at the code of the page that results from your script and by changing the position from absolute to relative it seems to show the whole pic. (Hope what I´m saying makes any sense!)
I also noticed by comparing my output to your pdf posted above that the all the fonts size look really small. I´m not sure if that´s a problem with the html to pdf converting tool I used.
What have you used for example to get your pdf from the output page of your script?
I don’t want to bother you too much since what you created is already a great tool, but if you could direct me into what values control what I could handle any further tweaking I need by myself!
Thanks again for any time you´ll dedicate to answer my questions!
M.S.

Regarding the header image, changing from absolute- to relative-positioning makes total sense, you just don’t have as much content in that box as mine does, so my content pushes the box big enough for the image, where yours doesn’t. It making the position relative works, then I will change that too, thanks!

As for the font-size, not sure what would do that… If it looks good in your browser before the conversion, then, yes, I would guess it has to do with your conversion tool. I use a Mac, and I create the PDF by simply hitting Print, then selecting Save as PDF. Can’t remember if Windows has a similar feature or not…

I did notice that the native PDF generator now works better. Line breaks are used and it uses the text of the currently chosen language. Not a beautiful document, bur more useful now it includes line breaks.